The Oldest Creation Myth in World, and its Origins

The first and oldest stories in the world maybe lost to us, but we can reconstruct them by finding their motifs and piecing them together. In this video I look at the earliest creation myth motifs, focused particularly on the Earth Diver and Tree of Life, to do this. I will tell a few different creation stories, and discuss how motifs have evolved, mixed, and dispersed. And finally I tell a story, reconstructed from all these motifs.

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*References*
Berezkin, Yuri (2007). "“Earth-diver” and “emergence from under the earth”: Cosmogonic tales as evidence in favor of the heterogenic origins of the American Indians". In: Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 32: 110–123. 10.1134/S156301100704010X.
Dundes, Alan. "Earth-Diver: Creation of the Mythopoeic Male". In: American Anthropologist, New Series, 64, no. 5 (1962): 1032–051. Accessed August 20, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/666952.
Napolskikh, Vladimir. "The Earth-Diver Myth (А812) in Northern Eurasia and North America: Twenty Years Later". Frog; Siikala, Anna-Leena; Stepanova, Eila (2012). Mythic Discourses: Studies in Uralic Traditions. Finnish Literature Society. pp. 120–140. ISBN 978-952-222-376-0.
Nagy, Ilona. "The Earth-Diver Myth (Mot. 812) and the Apocryphal Legend of the Tiberian Sea". In: Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 51, 3-4 (2006): 281–326. Accessed Aug 20, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1556/AEthn.51.2006.3-4.4

Chapters
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0:00 Introduction
2:28 The Beginning was made from The Nothing?
3:52 The Research
5:50 The Underworld and Earth Divers motifs
7:30 Understanding motif changes, The Bird Scout
9:42 The Oldest Creation Myth Motifs, The Earth Driver
11:59 Creation Myth Structure
13:30 Looking for the Motifs of Voids and Chaotic Waters
16:02 The Tree of Life or World Tree
18:13 Mixed Motifs in the Creation Myth
20:20 North American motifs
22:07 Where did the Creation Myth with these motifs originate?
22:48 But why an Earth Diver?
23:57 The earliest mythology of our ancestors?
22:57 The Magic of Wind from Vedic to Abrahamic religions
27:37 Putting it all together and conclusion